Rob Neyer

Verified.

Eighty billion dollars. Gone. To build a digital ghost town where legless cartoons stood around doing nothing, because Mark Zuckerberg looked at Facebook – a website people use to congratulate their guinea pig on its birthday – and thought: what this needs is a worse version of reality. He was wrong. Historically, catastrophically, trouserlessly wrong.

Ireland’s population chart remains a wild one to look at. The country has still not recovered from the Great Famine (1845-52).

@jasonbenetti Had the privilege of calling one of the first college basketball games Jason ever did for ESPN TV, many years ago. I had no idea who he was... It took about 3 minutes to see how talented he was and now the whole country knows his name, and how extraordinary he is. Plus, he's a great guy. Congrats, paisano. Good seeing you today. Nice job.

Progressives in the Pacific Northwest are lapping their CA sibs in the race for good housing policy. The latest: An Oregon ban on unfunded inclusionary zoning, with Democratic Socialists leading the charge! 1/3

There is zero justice if someone in their late 70s to early 80s could kill an entire family with their car and get their license back Again, you cannot possibly gaslight me into thinking elderly people getting driving *PRIVILEGES* revoked for age-related impairments is ageist

Conservation biology shows that alligator populations are now stable or fully recovered across the southeastern U.S. Their numbers are primarily limited by available wetland habitat. Killing alligators does not “save the species”—habitat protection does.

We can't have two economically illiterate parties, it's like having two fun parents, we're all gonna starve to death.

Just last year, California completed four wildlife crossings with an average price tag of $16 million – and 37 more are in progress across the state at an average cost of $15 million. The Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is the most ambitious project of its kind in the world with a much larger scale – it does not represent the average cost of our work to build more wildlife connectivity.

The backstory here is that the Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of this land a century ago. They sued, got their land back, and used their sovereignty to ignore local zoning rules and build 6,000 new homes over the objections of nearby NIMBYs.

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

If you're more worried about the look of you work vehicle than the safety of it then maybe you should quit and find another career.

Better things are possible

Everywhere. Rain or shine.

Lead shot should be banned everywhere. Lead is toxic in water, in meat, in soil. There are non toxic alternatives. There are no good reasons for governments not to do this.

People haven't wrapped their heads around how much the politics of renewables have been altered by the fact that Texas is kicking everyone's ass in building solar, wind, and batteries. Greg Abbot sounds woke when he talks energy now. That's a preview of what's coming nationally.

speed camera violations are $0 if you don’t speed

The ending of the dinosaurs is among the all-time great moments from any dinosaur documentary. Maybe even the best.

#ThoughtForTheDay Pigeons get called sky rats. But birds like these once carried messages through gunfire when every radio failed. And the part most people miss is this. For thousands of years humans relied on pigeons to move information faster than any technology available at the time. Their homing instinct is so precise that a trained bird released hundreds of miles away can still navigate straight back to its loft. That simple biological skill made them invaluable in war. During World War I and World War II, armies deployed hundreds of thousands of pigeons. When telephone wires were cut and radio signals failed, commanders often had only one reliable way to send a message through chaos. In 1918 a Pigeon named Cher Ami carried a desperate note from trapped American troops in the Argonne Forest. The bird was shot through the chest and lost part of a leg during the flight but still delivered the message, helping stop friendly artillery fire and saving nearly two hundred soldiers. Today their descendants wander city sidewalks, pecking quietly for crumbs. Most people see a nuisance. History once saw a lifeline with wings.

Texas is the clean energy capital of the United States. And a chunk of that is because of their easy permitting, relatively ample transmission, and highly deregulated electricity market. Abundance thinking in energy works.